QuizList

New Tuesday quiz with 7.30 pm start at:

The Black Lion, 274 Kilburn High Road, NW6 2BY, 020 7625 1635.

Thanks for that info and to all who send quizzes and other updates in.

There’s a new section now on St Albans quizzes in the right hand menu bar, and thanks again to ‘Grecian’ for this information.

For people who actually enjoy the question and answer aspect of pub quizzing, postal quizzes are good value for a small donation and usually support a worthy cause.  There is usually the prospect of a prize also.  A site which lists a large number of these is experiencing problems at present and I can’t access it, but will include a link at a later date.  In the meantime, why not try http://www.justgiving.com/theAutumnQuiz, which is in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support and which I can recommend as challenging and enjoyable.  Over to the organisers: ‘The Autumn Quiz consists of 100 famous women’s names defined by cryptic clues and the first correct entry drawn from the hat will win a magnum of Champagne’.  Can’t be bad.

I made reference above to the question and answer aspect of pub quizzing.  Of course, that’s not the only aspect.  Just offhand, I can think of the following:

1. Clashes of titanic egos

2. Availability of alcohol

3. Opportunity to see people who think they know it all crash and burn

4. Jackpots

5. The (very) slim possibility that you will learn something you hitherto did not know, and actually care about

6. Cash or other prizes

7. More than you ever wished to know about the variety of positions someone can get themselves into while trying to surrepitiously obtain answers on a mobile phone

8. The opportunity to hear the phrase ‘It’s only a bit of fun’ repeated ad infinitum

9. The perfect excuse to get out of the office party:  ‘Sorry, it’s the last quiz in the league we’ve been playing in that night!’

10. And finally:  Mister (Bastard) Men picture rounds, which are so dismal they put any other misfortunes in perspective

Byeee!

Not as many new ones as I thought, but some quizzes follow which are new to the site.  Any corrections or additions welcomed.

On Monday, there are quizzes at:

Pembury Tavern, 90 Amhurst Road, E8 1JH, 020 8986 8597.
Tufnell Park Tavern, 162 Tufnell Park Road, N7 0EE, 020 7281 6113, http://www.tufnellparktavern.com/.

Tuesday quizzes at:

Hemingway, 84 Victoria Park Road, E9 7JL, 020 8510 0215, http://www.thehemingway.co.uk/b.html.
Prince Alfred and Formosa, 5A Formosa Street, W9 1EE, 020 7286 3287, http://www.theprincealfred.com/.
Wenlock and Essex, 18-26 Essex Road, N1 8LN, 020 7704 0871, http://www.wenlockandessex.com/

 A Wednesday quiz at:

Botanist on the Green, 3-5 Kew Green, TW9 3AA, 020 8948 4838, http://thebotanistkew.com/

And to cap it all, a contestant call for a new quiz to be hosted by Ann Widdecombe, no less, looking for participants who are ‘true intellectual heavyweights and general knowledge know-it-alls’.  You mean rather than the new breed of quizzer, adept with mobile phone technology???  Let me know if you are interested and I will forward you the email.

A Tuesday night quiz which used to be at the Grey Goose in Clapham has moved to:

Park House Bar, 82-84 Clapham Park Road, SW4 7BX,  020 7622 7880  http://www.parkhouseclapham.com/

More new stuff to be added over the next month and I am working on a fairly big list of newer London stuff, so shorter postings this week and next.

Discussion is still raging on jackpots.  Trouble is, pubs know that a high jackpot will bring people in.  They consequently must suffer the horde of ‘professionals’ who descend when a jackpot reaches into the stratosphere.  Then they get complaints from locals and quiz regulars.    I’m not quite sure how word of jackpots gets round the place – I know a few pubs do post the rising figure on chalkboards outside their premises, but I suspect there is also a rich seam of Tweets or suchlike where these details are shared.

A couple of weeks ago I listed what I thought were some rules/laws of pub quizzing.  There are others which have been suggested. ‘Never change an answer’ is a fairly sound one, because how often do you change the wrong answer to the right one?  Less often than the reverse, I suspect.  Another one of NC’s is ‘Never chase a jackpot’.  It’s a bit like following my national team at rugby – it will end in heartbreak.  But, as ever, that’s life.

New Sunday quiz at:

The Lamb, 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, WC1N 3LZ,  020 7405 0713,  www.youngs.co.uk/pub-detail.asp?PubID=421.   Starts at 8pm in the upstairs bar and it is promised that questions are ‘unanorak-y’. 

And on that bombshell, we move on to jackpots.   Grumblings, mumblings and rumblings are permeating the walls of QuizList Towers, all about how jackpots are run and the perceived unfairness thereof.  Hence, what follows is QuizList’s Guide for QuizMasters about How to Run a Jackpot Without Getting Shot By Both Sides.

For the uninitiated, there are two types of jackpots.  One where people buy a ticket and if your ticket is drawn out you are given a question to answer.  Get it right, take the money.  Get it wrong, the money rolls over to next week or there is a further draw for half or a quarter of the amount.  The second is where all teams in the quiz are given the same 1-3 questions and the winners are the team who get everything right.  No all-correct answers, and it rolls over again.  Two or more teams get everything correct and a tiebreak (usually a number) is used to separate them.

For the single ticket jackpot, trouble can be minimsed if the following rules are followed:

1.  Cap the money at a reasonable amount (eg £500) and create a ‘reserve jackpot’ from anything else which accumulates.  This prevents unfeasibly large amounts accumulating (can we forget the missing £1000 jackpot…) and avoids a zero start when the main jackpot is won.

2. Try, try, try to avoid your pet topics in the questions, which your mates might know better than anyone else in the pub.  Again, there was a pretty unforgettable large jackpot win one night when a mate of the QM’s comes up, QM opens the envelope and says:  ‘Oh!  We were just talking about this the other day!’ and you can guess the rest.

3. Try likewise not to have ridiculously easy questions dotted among impossible ones – there will be cries of ‘Fix!’ if one of these comes out at an opportune time.

4. Rule 4 is the key rule.  Restrict entry into the jackpot to those playing in the quiz.  Sorry, but jackpots are built up by quiz players and the jackpot should be intended for them.  Bar staff, pub managers, people in the pub not playing the quiz, and people who walk in at 10.30 and casually join a team should not be able to buy tickets. I have a feeling that pub managers overestimate how much we love bar staff and do not realise that most quiz players’ tolerance of one of them winning a jackpot is fairly low.  Anyone having strong feelings about this, use the comment facility below. The rest of you know what I am talking about.

5. If necessary, but only if necessary, introduce some rules like limiting the number of tickets each individual buys.

For the other type of jackpot, where everyone gets the same question(s), capping the amount of money is also a good idea here, but this method guards against some of the pitfalls of the single-ticket jackpot in that you write your answers on your quiz sheet, so non-players can’t take part.  In some ways it is a much fairer method.

Also:

1. Limit the amount of time to get answers in so that internet searches are not possible.

2. If you must do a tiebreak, either ask it at the same time as the questions so that everyone hands in a quiz sheet with a ready made tiebreak, or if you call people up to answer a tiebreak question ask them to write it down.  If you ask for oral responses in a numerical question, experienced quiz players will hang back, go last, and then provide an answer one above or one below the other answers so that their answer covers a wider range.

Happy jackpot hunting!

New quiz at:

Jam Circus, 330-332 Brockley Road, Brockley, SE4 2BT, on Tuesday nights.  Free to enter, first prize £20, second prize bottle of wine, some home-baked goodies also awarded.  More info at www.tuesdaynightpubquiz.co.uk.

Following on from my question last week, ‘What’s with the obligatory 25-50% of the marks going on music????’ in quizzes in the South West, I was thinking about a fairer distribution of quiz questions.  I mean, imagine if they actually reflected the proportion of our time we spend in various activities, or the amount of money we spent on things…  So one third of the questions would be on sleep, about a further 20% on work, 15% on food, 15% on rent and mortgages – doesn’t leave a hell of a lot of room for music, sport and Mister Men pictures, does it? 

But even the mighty Newquay quiz scene has dumbed down somewhat, with one formerly half-decent quiz now offering a quarter of the points on music intros, about which you are repeatedly told:  ‘Oh, these are difficult, but the locals are very good at this….’  The other annoying thing about that quiz is the random tiebreak masquerading as a question in every round, like ‘How much does it cost to run the BBC website?’

Another quiz is so in thrall to one team that they don’t even need to give their names and no-one looks around to see who’s won, with most other punters tending to leave before that particular announcement…

Much as I like music, I don’t necessarily want every single quiz to turn on how much you know about this particular topic.  And anyway, wasn’t there a big kerfuffle a few years ago about pubs needing to pay performing rights if they wanted to include music intros?  How many are actually doing that?  I think we should be told…